An extremist, not a fanatic

July 28, 2006

Lesbians' pay

Tim complains about yet more research on the gender pay gap. But here's a queer thing. The same issue of Centrepiece reports on the pay gap between lesbians and heterosexual women. And guess what? Controlling for obvious things like education and occupation, lesbians earn 11% more than heterosexual women. Most of the male-female pay gap, then, is a penalty for heterosexual women only, not for women in general.There are four possible reasons for this:1. Heterosexual women suffer a pay penalty because of the risk they'll leave to have children. Lesbians suffer this less.2. Selection bias. The sort of people who admit to being lesbians in a survey are likely to be more than averagely confident. This could raise their pay.3. The pay penalty that women suffer is a penalty for psychological gender rather than physical gender. There's some academic evidence (not just old jokes) that some lesbians have more masculine psychological traits than straight women, as measured by (say) the Bem Sex Role Inventory. If it's masculine psychology, rather than male physicality, that gets a pay premium, this would benefit some lesbians.This, though, is a mixed blessing. Other research has found that masculine psychology is a drawback when investing (pdf).4. Maybe lesbians have unobserved characteristics that make them attractive to employers. Perhaps the fact that growing up knowing they are in a minority makes lesbians more adaptable or creative. Certainly, there's strongevidence that some are geniuses.

Surely the child-bearing thing is the most likely explanation? Lesbians can have children but are less likely to do so for obvious reasons and are therefore less likely to take career breaks. The confidence thing might be working at various levels but the key factor is if a lesbian is out to her prospective employer, they will rightly assume a career break to have children, while not impossible, is fairly unlikely.

That piece in Centrepiece wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Their conclusion is that about 50% of the gender gap is down to career breaks. They note that there is still a 12% difference between women who have never had such and male pay: part of whic, I would assume, is from employer’s worrying that they might, thus investing less in their training.
I wonder if that 11% more that lesbians get closes the gap with men? Or is it roughly the same as the 20% to 12% gap in the piece I was talking about?

I have heard before, that lesbians more often choose "men's proffessions", such as technicians, IT, etc, and gay men more often "women's proffesions", such as care and services. Maybe this could contribute to the fact that lesbians earn more than heterosexual women (and gay men less than heterosexual men)?

If lesbians are 12% more likely to be in work, and on average get paid 11% more, doesn't that mean (roughly) that the ones in work get paid the same amount?

No, as it says that they controlled for employment status and occupation in producing the 11% figure. (That vitiates another one of the comments on the page too, about career choice.)

There are also career choices outside of career breaks. Plenty of people choose not to kill themselves working very hard in order to make management track. And even outside of breaks, someone might decide to be more of the primary caregiver to children or just prefer being the spouse who works less in order to take care of stuff around the home.